Paradox Prime
by RavennaBlake
Summary: It has been many centuries and bodies since the Doctor last faced Bad Wolf, but he has never been able to ignore those two words. Now they've led him to an abandoned temple that shouldn't exist. What lies beyond the gilded doors?


The Doctor whistled softly to himself as he walked around the console, fiddling with whatever caught his interest as he tried to figure out just where he felt like zipping off to. He was on his own this time, Nardole having asked for shore leave to chat it up with a few friends. He was very careful in setting parameters as he walked laps around the console. Nowhere that would remind him of his last few companions so libraries were out. And restaurants, deserts, New York, banks, museums, art galleries, rock concerts, giant domes, asteroids, anything to do with Earth… he frowned as he plotted in the last limiting factors and a list of possible places popped up onto the view screen. The first one on the list made him sort in derision. An uninhabited lump of rock with breathable atmosphere that was too cold to be worth considering. It was followed by several brief descriptions of various moons he hadn't ever been to and a smattering of asteroids that were big enough to boast small communities that might have been interesting if he hadn't already seen oh, fifty. At least. He was starting to get restless being by himself. It was that mix of boredom and frustration that was liable to drive him insane instead of simply mad.

He was about to wipe all the parameters clean and just let the TARDIS choose when another entry caught his eye. It didn't seem like anything particularly exotic, just a temple on an asteroid, but the name struck a chord. Bad Wolf – or at least that was the English translation of the native tongue, natives that belonged to an entire series of planets that had never seen a wolf or a wolf-like creature in their entire evolutionary history. What's more, there was no other possible translation for those words. The word 'wolf' was only introduced later, after human contact and cultural history sharing. Only, this temple had been built long before humans had ever dreamed that there was a way to get to the big white blob in the night sky, let alone to another solar system and one half-way across the galaxy at that; but the temple had never had its name changed. It had always been Avanis Bau. Bad Wolf.

"Alrighty then." Never one to turn down a sign, the Doctor locked in the coordinates and the TARDIS sprang into action, wheezing and groaning as it spun off into the vortex. Within minutes the Doctor had landed in an atmospheric shell on an asteroid that might have been the size of a small city. The faint vibration below his feet told the Doctor that the asteroid had been hollowed out and fitted with all manner of equipment, including the machines that allowed him to breathe and kept various space detritus from whipping through the fragile habitable shell surrounding the temple and ripping everything to shreds. The TARDIS had landed so that he was facing outwards, away from the temple itself. The view of the stars, uninhibited by a true atmosphere or copious amounts of light pollution was still something that could catch him off guard every now and again. As he stood there admiring the view, a flicker of light snaked across the 'sky' and he was treated to a magnificent aurora. Ribbons of greens and blues danced with pinks and yellows, fading into oranges and purples. The show lasted a full five minutes before fading away and the Doctor finally turned to face the temple of Avanis Bau. Given the native culture, he had been expecting something fashioned out of natural stone and painted in bright colours. The local engineers were famous for using uncut stone to build with, managing to balance shapes perfectly without going to the trouble of grinding or etching the stone into regular shapes. What he found was a series of towers, each made of golden-hued glass that spiralled up from a connected base to form a curved structure that looked oddly enough like a tiara. The base of the closest, and tallest, spire boasted a massive golden statue of a humanoid woman with her head flung back and arms reaching up towards the heavens. Every detail was perfectly moulded and from a distance it almost looked as if the folds of her robe were moving in a gentle breeze.

The Doctor frowned. "That's not right." Rummaging around in his jacket pocket for his psychic paper, he stared at it as he tried to recall what the Gerivian people looked like. What stared back at him looked much more like a lobster than a human, with four large pincers and ten long, thin legs supporting a dark exoskeleton. At this point in Gerivian evolution, they had the power to build massive interplanetary colonies, settle their entire solar system and the ones around them, but not the technology to move further. They had yet to encounter other alien species. There was no possible way they would know what a humanoid woman looked like and try as he might he had no recollection of taking Rose to any of their planets or colonies. Though, admittedly it had been a long time ago. Lifetimes. He could be forgetting.

Stepping into the first spire, his eyebrows rose when he found himself up against a railing looking into a deep room. "Nice, very grand. Very unsubtle."

Another statue dominated the space. It looked like it was made in several layers with a dark, solid substance in the middle and several coloured layers of glass forming the skin of the statue. From different angles, light caught and played with different colours that glimmered and moved under the top layer of gold. The statue was of a woman, presumably the same woman who had been depicted out the front of the temple, only this time she was standing halfway up what looked like a rocky bluff. The robes appeared the same, but this time she was staring down the line of her right arm, which was outstretched to a silver-clad wolf. A pup in a darker shade of gold was clutched in her other arm, looking so lifelike that the Doctor felt if he reached out and touched the creature he would feel soft fur instead of glass. A large, dark wolf stood higher on the bluff behind her, pressed in close to her shoulders. Its eyes were fixed on the scene that played out below the figures, where wolves of various size and apparent age played, slept or howled.

To a different culture, the Doctor would have just dismissed the statue as a symbol of a deity of fertility and protection, but the Gerivians were so fundamentally different to what he was seeing that he just had to investigate further. Not that 'bad wolf' would have let him leave without at least exploring the place thoroughly. Pushing himself off the rail, he spotted a sign for stairs up to the left and figured it was as good a place as any to start. Being giant lobster-like creatures that had never met a humanoid before (supposedly) meant the stairs weren't so much stairs are they were large corrugated ramps. Only stumbling slightly on his way up, he climbed until the ramp finally petered off into a small platform. The spire was translucent, giving him a dizzying view all the way up, but here a small strip of glass was free of any colour, letting the starlight glimmer in 360 degrees of breathtaking universe. The ramp continued up until the very top of the spire, where a large hatch sat over his head.

"What do we have here then?" The Doctor punched a large, red button set into the wall and waited for a tell-tale hum or click that would signal the hatch opening. When, instead, a cable whipped around his arm and pulled tight on his wrist, he let out a yelp and reached for his sonic. The cable yanked until his palm was flush with the wall, just above the button. Struggling against the binding he almost didn't notice the flash of light that meant he had been scanned. A prick against the flesh of his palm made him flinch as he pressed the tip of the sonic against the cable, but he didn't have time to cut through the metal or remotely trigger the unlocking mechanism before the cable simply loosened and retreated back into an almost-invisible panel in the wall. A small section of glass lit up with the words 'Time Lord' written in Earth English, and his hearts skipped a beat. The panel glowed a cheery red before going dark. A chill crept up the back of his neck as he realised that the persistent humming that had run through the entire asteroid had stopped dead. Before he could worry about suffocating, the entire tower shuddered, swayed and flexed as machinery kicked to life with a vengeance. A curtain of shimmering energy fell around him and his brilliant mind only had time to detachedly note the transmat technology before the field engaged, shredding apart his atoms and streaming them elsewhere instantaneously.


End file.
